


How to Kill a King

by onlybylaura



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Death and the Maiden, F/M, Hades and Persephone AU, alternative universe, and we keep doing it anyway, inspired by a bunch of poetry, some deathless references if you squint, that one persephone/hades au antis have forbidden us from writing, trope-y, weird-ish timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 17:44:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15846225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onlybylaura/pseuds/onlybylaura
Summary: He is the King of the Underworld.She's been blessed by the goddess of Spring.It's been years since he last saw the light, until the day he met her.





	How to Kill a King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [miss_sofia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_sofia/gifts).



> They told me to stop comparing Reylo to Hades/Persephone SO HERE'S YET ANOTHER AU.

 

It had been long since he had seen the light.

He remembered but a shred of it, in his mother’s womb, but it had been so long ago that it was just a fleeting, shattered memory that he wasn’t sure existed. The light had fled him before he could touch it, and so it had remained.

He reigned only in darkness, in the Underworld, where nothing could touch him, not even death.

#

He was used to the darkness and death. As long as he was King, those had been his dominion, his destiny, his doom. The Underworld had welcomed him like one of its creatures, and there he reigned supreme over lost souls and broken bones.

He did not remember his name, or how long he’d been there. It had always been like this

He found it by accident—or maybe it found him. Gods tossed the dice of destiny with careless hands, and even kings were subject to their whim. It was a sliver of light, a fragment or a memory, a crack opening in the earth behind his throne and beckoning him like the song of the river Lethe. One moment it was there, that blinding, terrible light, and when he touched it, he passed through it.

He stood in the middle of a field, light basking on him like a newborn.

#

The girl noticed him first.

Among the flowers of spring, the fields that stretched into the horizon and the stems that grazed her knees like kisses of the soft breeze. He was darkness when there was only light, a shadow in a world that she’d only seen painted in yellow.

He didn’t see her at first, the light of the sun blinding him. She was used to being alone out in the fields, and flowers danced in every single of her steps. Instead of the light, there was a void now, and she couldn’t help but be drawn to it, a world so different than her own.

When he turned, his dark hair fell soft to his shoulders. His eyes were black as the pit, and yet she didn’t shrink away.

“Don’t be afraid,” were the first words he said.

She was not.

#

He returned.

The flowers shrunk away from his touch and the earth hardened under his steps. She knew who he was, then—King of the Underworld, of death and decay. Gray and black followed his cloak, and the bones rattled underneath the ground.

She’d always liked the bones. They were what fed the flowers to grow.

“Who are you?” She asked, the third time he appeared, even though she knew it by now.

He seemed surprise she had spoken. Maybe he thought she was just another illusion.

Another of his ghosts.

“You know who I am,” he said quietly. “Don’t you?”

The girl shrugged. The sunflowers bloomed next to her, and the dry of the land was sucked by her fingertips.

“Maybe,” she answered. “Why do you come here?”

He waited a second before answering. “I don’t know where here is.”

“This is home,” she replied.

“The fields?”

“All of it,” she said. She stepped closer. For the first time, he didn’t vanish. Every time she had tried to approach, he disappeared into the shadows and left nothing to her. Nothing to crave for, like a thirsty flower that needs growing.

He looked young. She’d heard the legends of the King of the Underworld, of how he reigned dark and cruel over those who were lost to them. She’d heard the village speaking, her mother, everyone mourning those that were gone. Dying was inevitable, she’d always thought. At least she knew that when she died, the flowers would still bloom where her bones lied to rest.

She walked another step, and crimson amaryllis blossomed underneath her bare heels.

He looked at her, and for the first time, the girl felt like he noticed her. Truly noticed. Not just the spring that followed the warmth of her touch, the soft skin of the breeze and the perfume that ran through her hair. Those things were superficial. They would not last forever.

When he looked, she knew he was seeing what lay beneath all that. He saw her bones and her core.

“Who are you?” He asked, instead.

“Rey,” she replied.

#

Rey waited for him each morning.

It was a dance between the two of them, dangerous and strange and new. She’d always been alone in the fields, her mother sending her away to make the flowers grow. She grew tired of the spring, of the buzzing of the bees and the lightness of her step. The flowers were new, but nothing else was.

Until he appeared.

At first, they were silent, afraid to speak. He knew her name, and nothing else. They walked side by side into the mounds, and where his cloak dragged, the ground crumbled and became gray. Where she walked, it turned green and began to grow again. Her mother said she had been blessed by the goddess of spring, and she would always remain chaste and waiting.

Her mother wanted her to marry one of the boys in the village and grow old, but Rey wanted none of those things.

After, he would bring her gifts. She did not know what to think of those. Boys would bring her flowers that she grew herself. They saw it as offerings, but they were like receiving clipped nails. They were things she made, things that once belonged to her and she discarded. The King of the Underworld did not bring her flowers. He brought her strange dresses and jewels. She did not have use for these things, but she liked them anyway.

“Are you always alone?” He asked her one afternoon, when they were both walking between the oak trees of the forest. She regarded them as old friends, souls she knew from past lives.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re alone too,” she pointed out. “Isn’t it unwise? Leaving your kingdom unguarded?”

That robbed him of an answer. He had a strange, quizzical expression in his face. She liked that about him. He was the King of the Underworld, a tale told to keep children in bed at night. He should scare her. She should be trembling and afraid. Yet when she looked, she could only see his scars that were very close to her own.

“It has been like that for thousands of years,” he replied. “One afternoon will not change the way it works.”

Rey lowered down as she picked the flowers that blossomed near the base of the oak trees. Under her sunlight touch, the colors burst in unexpected ways, brighter and full of life. She knew he was watching, fascinated.

She did not want him to leave.

“Tell me your name,” she said.

“I don’t have a name.”

“Everyone has a name,” she replied. “I have no family, and still I have a name.”

“I thought you had a mother.”

“She’s from the village,” Rey said. “She is not my true mother; the village is my home. I was left in an altar for the goddess of spring. The village keeps me because I make the crops grow.”

“That cannot be all.”

She looked back at him. She wanted to trace his hair with her fingertips, caress the scar that cut his face in half. It was a strange but beautiful sight. Still she did not move. Those things were not for mortal girls to long for.

“And so the Underworld cannot be all to you,” she said instead. “Tell me your name.”

He vanished before he answered.

#

_Tell me your name._

The words echoed into his heart, the one he wasn’t sure was still there. He could hear it beat now, after years of thinking that being the King of the Underworld meant he was already dead. Maybe death did come in other forms.

When he looked into the mirror, he could but see the ghost of his reflection, of the man he had once been. He did not remember. He could not remember ever doing anything else other than ruling, giving in to the darkness and sleeping on top of a pile of bones.

He walked to the river, quiet and somber. The ghosts parted to let him pass, the crown heavy on his brow. The orchards were dark when he passed, as was everything else. There was only the sliver of light when he was with her. He could remember things, snippets from a past life that he wasn’t sure was his own.

The river whispered of long dead poets and forgotten historians. It did not tell him his name.

#

When the King of the Underworld returned days later, Rey was sitting under a tree, intertwining grass blades in her fingers. They grew greener under her touch, and bent like it was their pleasure to take new shape under her care.

He noticed the shift in her mood.

“What happened?”

“Mother says it’s time I get married,” she replied. She kept fashioning the blades of grass in her hands. At first, she thought they were going to be a ring, but she did not like rings. Rings were things that bound her like shackles. “I’m nineteen and people say I’m too old to still be out here in the fields.”

The King of the World was quiet for a moment. “Do you want to get married?”

“Not to anyone in the village.”

She broke apart the blades of grass. They were supposed to die at her hands, but they mended quickly, falling to the earth and melting back into the green that sprung from where she walked. She couldn’t even express her frustration because it bloomed from the tips of her fingers in petals and stems.

The King of the Underworld had no reply to her. Rey looked at him only, imagining what it would be like to live in a different place, a different time—where she was not restrained to one single village, to one place in the world where she had to do what she always did. She didn’t want to watch the flowers grow forever.

“She won’t let me stay here long,” Rey said again. Mother wanted her home now, more than ever. Meeting suitors, looking at the boys who would pass through her window as if she was a butterfly to be trapped in a net.

Rey got up, brushing aside her dress. It was old, but she liked it anyway. She liked that some things could be kept simple.

“Don’t go,” the King said.

“I can’t stay,” Rey replied. “What do you want with me?”

She watched as he opened his mouth but no sound came out. The stories told her that death was quiet, but she didn’t think it would be this quiet.

Or this peaceful.

While the camelias and geraniums and sunflowers blossomed through her steps, gaining strength from her blood, she knew that they only grew because the dead things fed into it.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

He looked up at her, dark eyelashes casting shadows on his pale cheeks.

“Monsters have no name,” he said.

“And you are a monster.”

“Yes,” he said. “I am.”

#

“Where were you?” the woman snapped at her when she came home, her knees grazed with blood from where she’d scraped them. “You’re too old to be playing in that field.”

“You sent me to collect flowers, mama,” Rey replied, the word like a sharp-edged sword wielded by the goddess of war. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “Where are they, then?”

Rey put the dead flowers on top of the table. Flowers he had stepped on. Mother looked, horrified, at the grayish of the petals, the way they looked like they’d been swollen by the desert. Rey had never seen the desert, but she imagined it parched, cold and free.

As soon as she touched the flowers, they blossomed back into life. Mother looked calmer, but her gaze was unwavering.

“You must choose a suitor come the new moon,” she told her. “Young girls are not supposed to be alone and unattended.”

Rey answered the only way she could.

“Yes, mama.”

#

Rey thought about running.

She thought about running often, but she didn’t know where she would run to. The gods were unforgiving towards girls who abandoned their homes. There was nothing out there for her to run to, to look forward. Life was here, in the village, where she would make the flowers and the crops grow and the flowers blossom, where her tears would bring clouds of thin rain to fall while she hid in dark corners.

Life was a chain worn around her ankles, much like the blooms that adorned her feet.

The next time she was out in the fields, a light drizzle matched her mood. Her bare footsteps dampened the ground, shaping the plants and the trees and the leaves. The sunlight peaked from behind a cloud, a promise that the rain would pass. That it would always be the same.

She felt the presence behind her. She didn’t have to turn.

“Why do you keep coming back here?”

The King did not answer.

Rey turned to look at him. The long shadows that he cast over the field, the way that the rain drops did not seem to bother him. He was cast in the darkness, and bones creeped where he stepped, fearing his gaze. Rey knew she should fear him. She’d been blessed by spring, by light, by life.

He was all the things she was supposed to hate.

Instead, she stepped closer.

“How do you come here?” She asked instead.

“A crack in the earth,” he answered. “A window into the mortal world.”

“And you were not afraid to step through? Weren’t you scared of what you could find?”

“I was scared by what I would _not_ find.”

Rey nodded. She understood. The world waited for her. Perhaps she would not find the things she wanted there. Perhaps it was why she never dared to step further.

This time, she did. He didn’t step away. She kept coming closer, dandelions blooming where her footsteps landed, carving a path made of blossom and perfume and things that grow over the dead.

The King did not move.

She offered him her hand. At first, she thought he’d vanish, like he had done so many times before. Cast in shadows and darkness, pale as moonlight. He stood still, and her fingers grasped his.

Just a touch.

He stepped back, eyes wide.

“Ben,” he said.

“What?” She asked, confused.

“My name,” he replied. “I remember it now. Ben.”

Rey smiled.

#

Ben.

It was a simple name, something he’d cast aside so long ago he’d forgotten how to pronounce it. As soon as Rey touched him, a flash in his memories like blinding sunlight. He could remember.

He could not place his memories, too far gone. A child laughing, a mother stroking his hair, a cut with a sharp knife that made him bleed. A curse for his father’s sin, a punishment that led him to the dark.

A doom that led him here.

He could not remember it all, but he would not forget his name again.

#

There was only one day until the new moon.

Rey had counted the days, and she knew where she was. Mother asked her to choose, and she would dance away with snowbells at the tips of her toes, avoiding the question.

She was about to go out when Mother stopped her.

“Do not go out there. Not today.”

“I will only bring flowers.”

“Not today.”

“I promise I’ll be quick,” Rey said, not wanting to beg. “It’ll be just a moment.”

Mother nodded. Rey left through the door, leaving the village behind. She walked, hoping for anything that could make her break her promise. She was thirsty and hungry, had not been able to keep her food in the last couple of days.

When he found her, she was shaking, her fingers trembling in the ground while rosemary and thorns grew in circles around her.

“Tomorrow,” Rey said. “Tomorrow, Ben.”

He did not have an answer to her.

“I want it to go away,” she continued. It didn’t matter that he did not have an answer. He was listening. It was enough. “I don’t want to do any of this. Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you want to be King?”

The silence was damning. Maybe he did not remember that, either.

He was still a King. The King of the Underworld. A shadow, a darkness, a monster. A boy. He was all those things, and if he had no will, no say in this, neither did she. She had flowers springing from her touch, and yet, she had no consequence. She had nothing.

She was nothing.

“Not to me,” he replied, as if reading her thoughts, and offered his hand. A silent plea. He did not have to say the words to his offer. She knew them in her heart.

She took his hand.

#

Dark.

He brought her underneath the hills and the grounds and the bones, and he did not waver. For the first time, it didn’t look as if he was completely alone. She followed him, her touch sending flashes through his mind, and he showed her what he knew of the place he was supposed to belong. They walked together over bones and the cry of the lost souls, and nothing seemed to bother her. She was distant, cold.

He’d never brought a mortal to the Underworld. He didn’t know the rules.

Maybe Death took other forms.

After they’d walked together to the edge of the river, the water twinkling like starlight mirroring the fractured souls that passed through their flow, they stopped by the orchard. Rey looked only at the trees, the fruit heavy in their branches, red, ready to be plucked.

She stood looking for a long time.

He approached the tree, and she watched as he plucked the fruit from the tree, cracking it open with nimble fingers. The juice spilled red in his hands, and in the dark, it almost looked like blood.

He offered half to her.

She hesitated a moment. He could barely see her here, as if the Underworld was embracing her with its dark tentacles, shrouding her in the blackness. She took it, the red juice dribbling down her chin as she bit into it, her eyes focused on his.

“Stay,” he said.

And stay she did.

#

He didn’t know how long she would stay for. She walked among the darkness, as easily as he did, as if it did not bother her. He offered her half his kingdom, his crown, and she accepted them like she had accepted his other gifts—like they held no meaning to themselves, like they were not important at all.

He knelt to her, and only to her.

She was his Queen, but he never forgot her name.

“I must go,” she said once, when they lied together in the dark, skin against skin. Touch against touch. Her flowers bloomed even here, finding the cracks of light that she brought with her when she walked among the boneyards.

He did not stop her.

#

Rey came back to the village during the afternoon. Her footsteps still brought flowers with them, and she looked at the ground, wondering if that’s how it would always be. The past felt like a strange dream, covered in mist, as if she’d forgotten herself.

“What happened?” Mother asked, shaking her shoulders, her nails shredding her skin until the blood came out red. “Where were you, all this time?”

“With the King of the Underworld,” she answered in a small voice. Mother looked horrified. “He brought me with him.”

Mother screamed, her nails tearing red lines across her arms. She cried out in the corner, talking about how she was ruined, how she was marred, how there was no coming back from it. Her tears were like rivers sprouting from the rocks, and Rey watched as even the blood dripping from the scratches turned into poppies when they landed on the ground.

#

She answered all the questions but didn’t remember the details. It was like a strange dream, a hallucination, something she wasn’t sure happened entirely. A dream, fashioned out of shadows and temptation, designed to ruin the girl she was.

Mother sobbed in the corner, and when Rey walked through the village, whispers and sorrow followed her.

Ruined, ruined, ruined.

There were discussions and meetings she did not attend. Some said it was punishment from the gods, others agreed that this was a deed to be avenged. When they looked at her before, they only saw a sliver of a girl, something to be loved and admired and praised like a flower. Now there was something else, like dead leaves and stems that browned, and no one thought they would be pretty to look at anymore. She had been dragged, captured, taken to a place where no one dared to go.

She was better dead than returned. That way, her ruin was not stamped across her body and her footsteps.

That way, her ruin was buried and forgotten.

“Daughter,” Mother said one afternoon after a meeting, when Rey was gazing out of the windows on the fields, hoping there was some sort of sign. “We have a solution for this.”

Rey turned, her warm brown eyes blinking attentively.

Mother unfolded the fabric in her lap and showed her a dagger. It glinted in the sunlight, the blade dark as the cloak the King of the Underworld wore. Its edge was sharp, and Mother offered it to Rey.

“You know what you must do,” Mother said.

She kissed Rey’s forehead, and Rey said nothing.

#

There were legends on how to kill a king. Everyone knew them from the tales. Kings with weak hearts, with their deaths hidden inside an egg, where one fragile bone was all it took for them to break.

Rey knew better.

This is how she killed a king.

She came back to the Underworld. Let him wrap her in silks and velvets, let him talk to her and ask how she’d returned. Let him think he had won, somehow, won it all over, how Mother had predicted. He was vicious and terrible and cruel, and he deserved what was coming.

This is how she killed a king.

Find a girl. Make her strong and smart and kind. Make her find blossoms in the lines of her hands, and perfume that exhales from the cascades of her dark hair. Give her to the world, let the world claim her as its own, though scrape the love and the certainty away. Let her be taken and talk of her ruin and remind her that there was not ever belonging. Remind her that her body is ruined because of someone’s touch, and that she would never be whole again.

This is how she killed a king.

She smiled when he touched her face, when he brought his lips to hers. The dagger was concealed in her clothes, but he didn’t seem to notice. She let him touch her, his fingers whispering against her body, his hair the softest when she held his head as he brought spring from inside her, as they lay together in the dark with nothing between them.

This is how she killed a king.

Let him fall asleep, his crown forgotten somewhere between the throne room and the bedroom. Let him lie with no armor and no defenses, his pale skin exposed. She remembered what Mother had said, the ruin she’d brought. That her goddess would deny her and her legacy, that she would mean nothing. She waited until there was only his breathing, taking the dagger out of hiding, and placing the point of the blade upon his chest.

This is how she killed a king.

She waited, waited for something that she couldn’t place. An ache in her chest. His eyes fluttered open, but they weren’t hard. They were soft. Understanding. The sharp-edged steel cut just slightly into his skin, golden blood springing from the wound.

“Do what you need to do,” he said.

His eyes did not speak of any lies. His words were not harsh, they weren’t like Mother’s fingernails or the village whispers. He didn’t need any words between them.

She let the dagger fall.

When she cried, her tears blossomed into dandelions, carried by the wind of the river. He wiped them away from her face, and his kiss tasted dangerously of the seeds that bid her to stay in the dark.

She didn’t mind.

#

“You must go,” he said, though the words were but a soft whisper of the breeze, falling among the ghosts.

He never needed it to be louder than their surroundings. She heard the ghosts better, even when she was in the fields. She heard the bones rattling beneath her feet, and she didn’t mind.

She knew the fruit bid her back, just as it bound her here. Just as it called to her.

“I’ll come back,” she said.

She knew he’d heard, but she wasn’t sure he believed it. She wasn’t sure she believed it herself.

The mist here made it all seem like a dream. She just now realized she didn’t want to wake up.

#

The trial took place the moment she returned. She didn’t understand what it was for. To blame him? To save her? To determine her innocence still, that she hadn’t been robbed of the gold that ran inside her veins, of the magic of girlhood and spring and light?

Rey did not know any of those things. Perhaps she had never known them, not as long as Mother’s nails held her in place and scratched her shoulders, not as long as boys’ gaze followed her down the path of the village on the fields, eyes not on the flowers that she brought with her power, but on her legs and her breasts, things that they wanted to own and never could.

She had fled that type of desire, and it had come back to ruin her in the end.

“Did you or did you not kill him?” Mother asked, louder than all the other people in the village. They sat around in a circle. Boys and girls and women and small children and fathers and uncles and brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, all waiting for her judgment. For this trial that would save her.

A trial that would doom her.

“I did not,” she replied, and her voice resonated across the arena. It was not an arena truly, but to her, it was like a battlefield. The weather was dry all around her, and she had no tears left to cry, no water to shed over this poor, forgotten village.

“It was your redemption,” the judge said, standing tall over her while she sat in a chair.

Rey didn’t blink.

“Your way out, child,” he continued, but she did not feel like a child. This was not what she was on trial for.

She hadn’t forgotten the word they’d used. She hadn’t forgotten that she was ruined.

“I will not kill him,” she said again, louder this time.

“Were you not dragged?” Mother asked, her tone becoming a little desperate, as Rey’s face was placid and calm. Her fears had been quenched from the moment he had shown up. There was nothing to fear from him. “Were you not taken, by force, by death? Tell us, child, and you’ll be forgiven. Your goddess will still love you.”

Rey looked down at the ground, where her toes traced circles in the grass. The blessing did not waver. The village did not understand the gods. They did not speak to them directly. They had faith, yes, but sometimes, it was not enough.

With her feet digging into the ground, she watched as the jasmines and small lilies still sprung from the ground, unwavering.

She didn’t know what they wanted from her, or what they expected. What was she supposed to confess? To her temptation? To her weakness? To her strength?

“You must return here,” the judge continued to say, and Rey was tired. Tired to her bones, to her core. She knew what eating the fruit meant. Six months here, six months in the Underworld. Unless she had killed him.

Then she’d be cured. She’d be pardoned for a sin she had never committed.

Rey got up from the chair, and the whole village watched.

“Tell me what you want to ask. To truly ask.”

Mother’s eyes glistened dangerously. She didn’t dare to ask the questions, what they were all wondering. Rey wished she could put it into words, though she’d never had a gift with those. Her gift had always been for making things grow.

“You should not have left me on the fields,” Rey announced, looking at Mother. “I grew flowers, yes, but I grew thorns. And I grew for me the life I wanted.”

“The life you wanted was here.”

Rey looked at the fields beyond. Of the life she’d dreamed there, of the love she’d learned to grow herself. Of thorns and teeth and the hunger she felt, the thirst for new things. The wanting, desperate wanting, in her bones, for a single place that she would not be alone anymore. For someone who would be like her. She hadn’t been dragged anywhere she didn’t want to go.

“I wasn’t taken,” she finally said, her words pointed as the acorns. “I left.”

She looked at them all in the eye.

“He looked at me and saw me as his equal and offered me a seat by his side. Do you really think I ate the fruit unwillingly?”

#

She walked back into the darkness of the Underworld, the shiver of light following her path. The King of the Underworld stood suddenly from his throne of bones and souls, his face falling in disbelief. There was no sign of where the dagger had pierced his skin, no sign of him being anything other than he was.

Rey walked until she was facing him.

“You came.”

“I said I would,” she replied.

They didn’t talk about returns. They didn’t talk about the fact that she would have to go up there to bring the springs and the flowers, that her goddess’ blessing meant that she was to stay above the ground. They didn’t talk about the fact that she would leave again soon.

“Tell me,” he said.

She grasped his fingers. Cold, dreary. Hers and hers alone. The crown that sat upon his head was shared with her.

“Were you hungry?” He asked, his voice quiet like the ghosts that roamed the Underworld. “That day. Were you hungry?”

She looked at him. “I was.”

Ben’s face fell.

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t choose,” Rey said. “I was hungry, but I ate because I wanted to. No seeds can bind me.”

She placed the back of his hand in her lips, feeling the cold touch of his skin. Her kissed brought warmth and made the King shiver.

“I stay because I want to,” she said.

“Then stay,” he told her.

Ben smiled, and she smiled back. They didn’t talk about returns. They were here now. Some happiness was worth certain sacrifices.

#

Her mother sent her flowers, to remind her of the months she would stay out in the world. Ben looked at them with a strange and sorrowful look.

Rey stood closer to him, picked up the flowers, and threw them into the river.

Flowers were for the dead, and she wasn’t one of them.

Rey took his hand again, the gold crown light upon her brow. She knew the reasons why she would stay. She would go, yes, but she would return.

She always did.


End file.
